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SPEIDEL Hans~NEW~
Generalleutnant
Speidel, Dr.phil., Hans
*October 28th, 1897 (Metzingen, Germany)
+November 28th, 1984 (Bad Honnef/North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany)
Knights Cross: April 1st, 1944
As: Generalleutnant Chef, Generalstab, 8. Armee
Speidel joined the German Army in 1914, fought in the First World War, and stayed with the Army as a career soldier after the war. He served as chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel during the Second World War and was promoted to lieutenant general in 1944. Speidel participated in the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, and he was tasked with recruiting Rommel for the resistance. After the plot failed he was arrested by the Gestapo. With the help of religious Pallottines, he was able to escape together with other prisoners and they were able to go into hiding in Urnau in today's Lake Constance district and were taken there by French troops in the last days of the war. Speidel was one of the few participants in the 20 July Plot to survive the war.
In April 1944, Speidel was appointed Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group B, stationed on the French Atlantic coast. When Rommel was wounded, Speidel continued as Chief of Staff for the new commander of Army Group B, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.
On 26 August 1944, Speidel answered the phone when Alfred Jodl, the OKW chief of staff, called Field Marshal Walter Model, commander in chief of the western front, with Hitler's order to start targeting Paris immediately with V1 and V2 rockets. Model was not in. Speidel never did pass on the order to his superior.
Speidel, a professional soldier and nationalist conservative, agreed with those aspects of Hitler's policy that returned Germany to its perceived place as a world power, but disagreed with the Nazis' racial policies. He was involved in the 20 July Plot to kill Hitler and had been delegated by anti-Hitler forces to recruit Rommel for the conspiracy, which he had cautiously begun to do prior to Rommel's injury in a British strafing attack on 17 July 1944. Speidel managed to become Rommel's confidant, purely by chance: Lucie Rommel, after having an argument with the wife of Alfred Gause (Rommel's then Chief-of-Staff) about who had the more honourable place at a wedding, decided to not only evict the Gause couple out of her house but to order her husband to dismiss Alfred Gause as well. Rommel chose Speidel, a fellow Swabian, as his new Chief-of-Staff.
Following the assassination attempt, the Gestapo rounded up, tortured and executed some five thousand Germans, including many high-ranking officers. Speidel's involvement was suspected by the Gestapo, and he was arrested on 7 September 1944. Rommel, in his final letter to Hitler of 1 October 1944, appealed for Speidel's release, but received no answer. Speidel appeared before an Army court of honour. According to an affidavit left by Heinz Guderian and Heinrich Kirchheim, during interrogation he blurted out Rommel's name. Maurice Remy comments that Speidel's testimony did not truly betray Rommel, although Speidel probably blamed himself until his death for his revered Field Marshal's fate afterwards. Unknown to Speidel though, his statement offered nothing new or startling to the interrogators, who had already obtained from other co-conspirators the information that Rommel not only knew about but agreed with the assassination. Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian and Wilhelm Keitel refused to expel him from the German Army. Thus he was not compelled to appear before Roland Freisler's People's Court, which would have been a death sentence. He was jailed for seven months by the Gestapo. As Allied forces approached the location where he was held, he slipped from his captors and went into hiding for not longer than three weeks until 29 April 1945, when French troops entered the area.
Signed picture from book or magazine with photo of Speidel in Bundeswehr uniform
Price: $30.00
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